The Dilemma of Olympics Coverage
Jason Fry |
Feb. 22, 2010 8:01 a.m.
 |
Recently the question came up at dinner with a mix of friends who are journalists, news junkies, sports fans and more-casual Olympics viewers. That led to a raucous debate, as I think it would at a lot of restaurant tables. The Olympics may be unique among sporting events in that there isn’t one principal audience for them. Instead, there are different, overlapping audiences who watch the games differently — and want news organizations to handle news about them differently.
The first Olympics audience is sports fans. You can tell members of this audience because they’re the ones mad at NBC. They want to watch events live, the way they watch other sports, and they complain that NBC is living in the past by showing many events only in prime time, hours after they’ve taken place.
Here’s their case, as articulated by Business Insider’s Henry Blodget: “We don’t want to watch NBC’s ‘Olympics show.’ We want to watch The Olympics. And like every other connected sports fan on the planet these days, we know exactly when the Olympics is taking place and what’s happening there — in real time. So, right now, for us, NBC isn’t the network that brings us the Olympics. It’s the network that prevents us from watching the Olympics.” (Business Insider later taught annoyed sports fans how to watch live video streams offered by Canadian Web sites, which requires making your computer look like it’s connecting to the Internet from Canada.)
But there’s another, bigger Olympics audience. This one contains sports fans, too – ones who only care about skiing and snowboarding every four years. But for the most part, this second audience is made up of people who aren’t normally sports fans. They like stories about the athletes and the setting and the suspense of the competition — for them, the Olympics is “a mini-series that happens to have some sports in it,” as Deadspin’s Dashiell Bennett puts it nicely.
How can you tell members of this audience? They’re the ones mad at news organizations.
For the most part, the folks in this audience don’t mind that the bulk of NBC’s Olympic coverage isn’t live. What they object to is spoilers, and how hard it is to avoid them. Today, maintaining a daylong news blackout means staying away from Web sites posting the results, news alerts sent as emails and text messages, and friends’ tweets and Facebook status updates. (There’s also the guy at the water cooler who doesn’t know you’re avoiding news.) The problem is summed up by Michael Rosenberg in Sports Illustrated: “If you want NBC’s coverage to seem suspenseful — if you want, in other words, to feel like a sports fan — then you have to build a tiny brick house, then take the last brick and hit yourself over the head until you’re unconscious.”
Fans in this predicament have asked news organization to help by not giving away the outcome of events in home-page headlines and summaries. The response, generally speaking, has been that news is news and will be reported as such. New York Times sports editor Tom Jolly, for instance, told public editor Clark Hoyt in response to reader complaints that “our job is to report the news. … [NBC] has made a business decision to show the highlights on a taped basis. We’re not beholden to presenting the news the way NBC does.”
Digital-media critic Dan Gillmor, meanwhile, commented that “the fact that the ombudsman of the New York Times needs to explain to readers why his newspaper reports actual news as it happens — and Olympic results are actual news — is a depressing commentary on our nation’s entertainment-driven culture. NBC bought U.S. TV rights to the Olympics, and NBC has chosen not to present live coverage. It wants to put the high-profile events on at night in the U.S. when it can score the biggest audience. It’s entirely about money, as the Olympics are in a general sense at this point. But to suggest that real news organizations should defer to NBC’s greed is beyond idiotic. It’s pathetic.”
I agree with Jolly and Gillmor in principle: News organizations shouldn’t let a network dictate how they cover events. But I think they’ve made the issue about NBC, when it’s not that simple. And by framing the issue that way, I think they’re doing readers a disservice.
To be clear, I think NBC is serving consumers poorly by not showing live events. (When people are faking Canadian IP addresses, it’s pretty clear that there’s a consumer need going unmet.) I doubt daytime broadcasts would do much to hurt viewership: Hardcore sports fans would watch live when they could, while casual Olympics fans would keep watching in prime time, probably joined by a fair number of sports fans who wanted to see events with family and friends or just relive the best moments.
But if that happened, news organizations would still have the same problem. Many people would still be unable to watch until prime time because of work or school. Those people would try to avoid spoilers, and when that failed they would still send emails to editors like Clark Hoyt.
Here’s a better way to handle this:
* Sportswriters should write on deadline and tweet as Olympic events unfold. But they should also tell their Twitter followers, Facebook fans and other readers ahead of time what their ground rules will be, so spoiler-sensitive readers can stop following them or stay away for a couple of weeks. (I wish Twitter let me specify that I want to follow someone but hide their tweets with specific hashtags, but that’s another column.)
* News organizations should either set up Olympics news alerts that are separate from general news alerts, or warn general-news subscribers that Olympics results will be included in emails, text messages and other communications.
* Sports pages should handle the Olympics in real-time like any other news, and news organizations should provide links to this Olympics coverage from their home pages. But home-page headlines, summaries and photos should be chosen and written to avoid spoilers.
* None of the above applies if an Olympics story breaks that is obviously of critical importance and/or general interest beyond the games – an athlete dying in competition, for instance.
The Olympics are news. But they’re an a odd form of news that people consume differently – equal parts live sporting event and time-shifted reality show – and news organizations should do more to take their unique nature into account. It’s bad practice to pretend events haven’t happened yet. But it’s bad business to train a large number of readers to exclude your home page from their daytime rounds for two weeks.
And really, the readers who wrote to Hoyt weren’t asking for much. They weren’t asking the Times to pretend events hadn’t happened yet. They were simply asking for the Times to not give everything away on the home page. That strikes me as a reasonable request. I wouldn’t call granting it eroding news judgment or kowtowing to a corporation. I’d call it good old-fashioned customer service.
Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at www.WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.
Jason,
I’m a big believer in customer service, but I’m quite certain that your suggestion would create a far greater customer service problem for the Times.
People come to our home page for the latest news. Sometimes they know something big happened and want to read what we have on it, but often they are checking in to find out what they DON’T know. They trust our judgment to tell them what’s most important and interesting in that moment.
There are two obvious problems with creating the two-step process you propose for presenting Olympic news.
One is that they don’t know what they don’t know. If, say, Bode Miller unexpectedly wins a gold medal, how would you tell readers that something surprising has happened – without spoiling it for those few you’re proposing to protect? “Click here for men’s super-combined results” doesn’t seem to do it. And do you really think those few readers who supposedly don’t want to know a result would resist “click here for surprise finish in super-combined”?
Your two-step process would also create a problem for us as a news operation. Statistics show that the home page gets far more traffic than any other section and that, for whatever reason, traffic drops off when we ask readers to follow a link from the home page to elsewhere. As you point out, news about the Olympic results is everywhere; why would we create a process that would inevitably push many readers elsewhere to find it?
I also want to be clear that I’m not trying to make this about NBC. As far as I’m concerned, the network paid a lot of money for exclusive rights to the Games and it has the right to show them whenever and however it wants. That doesn’t change the fact that the Games are a news event, and that we are serving our own audience by presenting that news as effectively as we can.
The fact is we get a small number of complaints along these lines whenever a network shows an event on tape delay; the Australian Open and French Open are two examples that come to mind. (Notably, we also get complaints on the rare occasion when we aren’t prompt in posting a result, as was the case the other night with Shani Davis’s victory in the 1,000-meter speedskating race.)
I’m sympathetic to people who wish they could watch the Olympics without knowing the result, but it strikes me as strange that they think we should be a party to it. My stepson is allergic to nuts; he knows to avoid them. Isn’t this as simple? We’re a news site, for heaven’s sake. If you don’t want to know the news, don’t go looking for it – and don’t ask us to punish the vastly greater audience that does want to know.
Best,
Tom Jolly
Sports editor
The New York Times
212-556-7197
http://twitter.com/tomjolly
http://www.nytimes.com/sports
Hi Tom, very much appreciate your reading and commenting.
Only you know the number of people who complain about sports spoilers on the front page, but I bet a lot fewer do for events like the Opens then for the Olympics. If I’m right, I think that’s because those are fundamentally different audiences: Tennis has a following among people who pay attention only for the big events, yes, but it’s nowhere near the numbers of people who are very casual sports fans or not sports fans at all — except for the couple of weeks that the Olympics are on. I think the combination of that different audience, the issue of tape delay and the fact that this only happens every two years makes for a fairly unique situation that ought to be considered as such.
Re the two-step problem for Olympics news on the home page, I do think “Men’s Super-Combined Results” is an OK answer to this dilemma (I say OK because I don’t pretend there are any great ones), prefaced with a short explanation of what the Times is doing and why. Yes, I think those staying spoiler-free would be able to resist the link. Or if they couldn’t, at least they wouldn’t then get PO’d and write to Clark Hoyt.
I certainly understand that the traffic drop-off inherent in asking people to follow links is a business problem. But suggesting people avoid your site for two weeks isn’t great business either. The two-step process is a fairly slight punishment for those who do want to know news at a glance, and could be mitigated by the goodwill associated with an explanation of why you’re doing it. Currently, the punishment is a lot bigger for those who don’t want to know Olympics results but do want to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. I understand the dilemma and appreciate that you haven’t made a knee-jerk decision, but I still think there’s a better balance to be found.
Metaphors tend to yield rapidly diminishing returns, but let me borrow your nut allergy metaphor. The people who want to avoid Olympics spoilers know that the sports classroom and the temporary Olympics classroom is full of kids eating metaphoric peanut butter, and they know not to go in there. But for a couple of weeks every two years, they’d like to be able to go into the school lobby and get to the Arts classroom or the World News classroom without encountering folks eating peanut butter. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
Jason,
Let’s stipulate two points: (1.) The audience for the Olympics is different than the typical sports audience. (2.) The metaphor is reaching the point of diminishing returns.
To the larger issue of whether we are driving away a significant number of readers because we don’t have a “spoiler alert,” believe me, we’d adjust if there were indications that was true.
Case in point: Just a few weeks ago, readers stormed our email gates in protest after we changed the way we presented our TV listings. We reversed course and went back to the original listings.
It’s one thing to be resolute and determined about reporting the news, it’s quite another to say that we’re going to present that news a certain way whether the readers like it or not. As I said in my earlier response, quite the opposite is true: our Olymipcs coverage is driving traffic higher.
Much of the attraction of news is learning the unexpected.
Here’s an example from yesterday: How many people do you suppose would follow the two-step process of clicking on “10,000-meter speedskating results” on the home page to get to a story about the race? But how many would read about the race if they came to the home page and saw the headline “Coach’s gaffe costs speedskater apparent gold”?
I’m not in any way saying that we don’t care if some readers are leaving the school to avoid the peanut butter (sorry, sorry), but when so many more are coming in to enjoy it, that trade-off is a lot more palatable.
Best,
Tom
Hi Tom, enjoying the discussion — thank you for it. And agree we should let our poor abused metaphor flee to safety.
I think we’re not really too far apart. I’m relieved to hear you’re open to adjusting coverage in response to a certain level of reader dissatisfaction; I think the ombud’s post made policy on that point sound more set in stone than it seems like it is.
Speaking of the misadventures of Sven Kramer (who’s had quite the Olympics), I think that your Coach’s Gaffe headline would be a great one in conjunction with a general spoiler warning. It’s not deadly dull for readers who don’t care about spoilers (in a way that I certainly agree “10,000-meter speedskating results” is), yet it doesn’t give anything away.
I know it wouldn’t always be that easy: “Surprise Finish” can be a spoiler in itself, of course, and avoiding spoilers means limiting one’s photo choices. And I know that the underlying principle remains up for debate. But I’m glad to hear the principle doesn’t trump the reader. That was the heart of my disagreement, and I’m happy to hear it isn’t so.
Since we appear to have achieved detente, I’ll close with this: My bet is that the question about spoiler alerts will soon be rendered moot. Real-time communication is evolving too quickly for tape-delay to survive as a successful broadcast model.
Do the sound people at the olympics think that the back ground noise of fans sceaming adds to the enjoyment of a good hockey game? I guess if you dont know about the game it may seem like it.But then you would have nobody to let you know when to cheer.I think I would rather hear the broadcasters and leave the noise level out